OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Expander Datacenters: From Theory to Practice
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Recent work has shown that expander-based data center topologies are robust and can yield superior performance over Clos topologies. However, to achieve these benefits, previous proposals use routing and transport schemes that impede quick industry adoption. In this paper, we examine if expanders can be effective for the technology and environments practical in today's data centers, including the use of traditional protocols, at both small and large scale while complying with common practices such as over-subscription. We study bandwidth, latency and burst tolerance of topologies, highlighting pitfalls of previous topology comparisons. We consider several other metrics of interest: packet loss during failures, queue occupancy and topology degradation. Our experiments show that expanders can realize 3x more throughput than an equivalent fat tree, and 1.5x more throughput than an equivalent leaf-spine topology, for a wide range of scenarios, with only traditional protocols. We observe that expanders achieve lower flow completion times, are more resilient to bursty load conditions like incast and outcast and degrade more gracefully with increasing load. Our results are based on extensive simulations and experiments on a hardware testbed with realistic topologies and real traffic patterns.
Spelling Error Correction Using a Nested RNN Model and Pseudo Training Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a nested recurrent neural network (nested RNN) model for English spelling error correction and generate pseudo data based on phonetic similarity to train it. The model fuses orthographic information and context as a whole and is trained in an end-to-end fashion. This avoids feature engineering and does not rely on a noisy channel model as in traditional methods. Experiments show that the proposed method is superior to existing systems in correcting spelling errors.
GlobalTrait: Personality Alignment of Multilingual Word Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a multilingual model to recognize Big Five Personality traits from text data in four different languages: English, Spanish, Dutch and Italian. Our analysis shows that words having a similar semantic meaning in different languages do not necessarily correspond to the same personality traits. Therefore, we propose a personality alignment method, GlobalTrait, which has a mapping for each trait from the source language to the target language (English), such that words that correlate positively to each trait are close together in the multilingual vector space. Using these aligned embeddings for training, we can transfer personality related training features from high-resource languages such as English to other low-resource languages, and get better multilingual results, when compared to using simple monolingual and unaligned multilingual embeddings. We achieve an average F-score increase (across all three languages except English) from 65 to 73.4 (+8.4), when comparing our monolingual model to multilingual using CNN with personality aligned embeddings. We also show relatively good performance in the regression tasks, and better classification results when evaluating our model on a separate Chinese dataset.
Examining Performance of Sketch-to-Image Translation Models with Multiclass Automatically Generated Paired Training Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Image translation is a computer vision task that involves translating one representation of the scene into another. Various approaches have been proposed and achieved highly desirable results. Nevertheless, its accomplishment requires abundant paired training data which are expensive to acquire. Therefore, models for translation are usually trained on a set of paired training data which are carefully and laboriously designed. Our work is focused on learning through automatically generated paired data. We propose a method to generate fake sketches from images using an adversarial network and then pair the images with corresponding fake sketches to form large-scale multi-class paired training data for training a sketch-to-image translation model. Our model is an encoder-decoder architecture where the encoder generates fake sketches from images and the decoder performs sketch-to-image translation. Qualitative results show that the encoder can be used for generating large-scale multi-class paired data under low supervision. Our current dataset now contains 61255 image and (fake) sketch pairs from 256 different categories. These figures can be greatly increased in the future thanks to our weak reliance on manually labeled data.
A Cascaded Channel-Power Allocation for D2D Underlaid Cellular Networks Using Matching Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

We consider a device-to-device (D2D) underlaid cellular network, where each cellular channel can be shared by several D2D pairs and only one channel can be allocated to each D2D pair. We try to maximize the sum rate of D2D pairs while limiting the interference to cellular links. Due to the lack of global information in large scale networks, resource allocation is hard to be implemented in a centralized way. Therefore, we design a novel distributed resource allocation scheme which is based on local information and requires little coordination and communication between D2D pairs. Specifically, we decompose the original problem into two cascaded subproblems, namely channel allocation and power control. The cascaded structure of our scheme enables us to cope with them respectively. Then a two-stage algorithm is proposed. In the first stage, we model the channel allocation problem as a many-to-one matching with externalities and try to find a strongly swap-stable matching. In the second stage, we adopt a pricing mechanism and develop an iterative two-step algorithm to solve the power control problem.
How2: A Large-scale Dataset for Multimodal Language Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we introduce How2, a multimodal collection of instructional videos with English subtitles and crowdsourced Portuguese translations. We also present integrated sequence-to-sequence baselines for machine translation, automatic speech recognition, spoken language translation, and multimodal summarization. By making available data and code for several multimodal natural language tasks, we hope to stimulate more research on these and similar challenges, to obtain a deeper understanding of multimodality in language processing.
Helping each Other: A Framework for Customer-to-Customer Suggestion Mining using a Semi-supervised Deep Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Suggestion mining is increasingly becoming an important task along with sentiment analysis. In today's cyberspace world, people not only express their sentiments and dispositions towards some entities or services, but they also spend considerable time sharing their experiences and advice to fellow customers and the product/service providers with two-fold agenda: helping fellow customers who are likely to share a similar experience, and motivating the producer to bring specific changes in their offerings which would be more appreciated by the customers. In our current work, we propose a hybrid deep learning model to identify whether a review text contains any suggestion. The model employs semi-supervised learning to leverage the useful information from the large amount of unlabeled data. We evaluate the performance of our proposed model on a benchmark customer review dataset, comprising of the reviews of Hotel and Electronics domains. Our proposed approach shows the F-scores of 65.6% and 65.5% for the Hotel and Electronics review datasets, respectively. These performances are significantly better compared to the existing state-of-the-art system.
Continuous-time Intensity Estimation Using Event Cameras
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Event cameras provide asynchronous, data-driven measurements of local temporal contrast over a large dynamic range with extremely high temporal resolution. Conventional cameras capture low-frequency reference intensity information. These two sensor modalities provide complementary information. We propose a computationally efficient, asynchronous filter that continuously fuses image frames and events into a single high-temporal-resolution, high-dynamic-range image state. In absence of conventional image frames, the filter can be run on events only. We present experimental results on high-speed, high-dynamic-range sequences, as well as on new ground truth datasets we generate to demonstrate the proposed algorithm outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.
Hybrid Pruning: Thinner Sparse Networks for Fast Inference on Edge Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We introduce hybrid pruning which combines both coarse-grained channel and fine-grained weight pruning to reduce model size, computation and power demands with no to little loss in accuracy for enabling modern networks deployment on resource-constrained devices, such as always-on security cameras and drones. Additionally, to effectively perform channel pruning, we propose a fast sensitivity test that helps us quickly identify the sensitivity of within and across layers of a network to the output accuracy for target multiplier accumulators (MACs) or accuracy tolerance. Our experiment shows significantly better results on ResNet50 on ImageNet compared to existing work, even with an additional constraint of channels be hardware-friendly number.
Multilingual NMT with a language-independent attention bridge
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we propose a multilingual encoder-decoder architecture capable of obtaining multilingual sentence representations by means of incorporating an intermediate {\em attention bridge} that is shared across all languages. That is, we train the model with language-specific encoders and decoders that are connected via self-attention with a shared layer that we call attention bridge. This layer exploits the semantics from each language for performing translation and develops into a language-independent meaning representation that can efficiently be used for transfer learning. We present a new framework for the efficient development of multilingual NMT using this model and scheduled training. We have tested the approach in a systematic way with a multi-parallel data set. We show that the model achieves substantial improvements over strong bilingual models and that it also works well for zero-shot translation, which demonstrates its ability of abstraction and transfer learning.
Improving CNN Training using Disentanglement for Liver Lesion Classification in CT
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Training data is the key component in designing algorithms for medical image analysis and in many cases it is the main bottleneck in achieving good results. Recent progress in image generation has enabled the training of neural network based solutions using synthetic data. A key factor in the generation of new samples is controlling the important appearance features and potentially being able to generate a new sample of a specific class with different variants. In this work we suggest the synthesis of new data by mixing the class specified and unspecified representation of different factors in the training data. Our experiments on liver lesion classification in CT show an average improvement of 7.4% in accuracy over the baseline training scheme.
Minimizing Close-k Aggregate Loss Improves Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

In classification, the de facto method for aggregating individual losses is the average loss. When the actual metric of interest is 0-1 loss, it is common to minimize the average surrogate loss for some well-behaved (e.g. convex) surrogate. Recently, several other aggregate losses such as the maximal loss and average top-$k$ loss were proposed as alternative objectives to address shortcomings of the average loss. However, we identify common classification settings, e.g. the data is imbalanced, has too many easy or ambiguous examples, etc., when average, maximal and average top-$k$ all suffer from suboptimal decision boundaries, even on an infinitely large training set. To address this problem, we propose a new classification objective called the close-$k$ aggregate loss, where we adaptively minimize the loss for points close to the decision boundary. We provide theoretical guarantees for the 0-1 accuracy when we optimize close-$k$ aggregate loss. We also conduct systematic experiments across the PMLB and OpenML benchmark datasets. Close-$k$ achieves significant gains in 0-1 test accuracy, improvements of $\geq 2$% and $p<0.05$, in over 25% of the datasets compared to average, maximal and average top-$k$. In contrast, the previous aggregate losses outperformed close-$k$ in less than 2% of the datasets.
VizRec: A framework for secure data exploration via visual representation
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2018
Year: 2018

Visual representations of data (visualizations) are tools of great importance and widespread use in data analytics as they provide users visual insight to patterns in the observed data in a simple and effective way. However, since visualizations tools are applied to sample data, there is a a risk of visualizing random fluctuations in the sample rather than a true pattern in the data. This problem is even more significant when visualization is used to identify interesting patterns among many possible possibilities, or to identify an interesting deviation in a pair of observations among many possible pairs, as commonly done in visual recommendation systems. We present VizRec, a framework for improving the performance of visual recommendation systems by quantifying the statistical significance of recommended visualizations. The proposed methodology allows to control the probability of misleading visual recommendations using both classical statistical testing procedures and a novel application of the Vapnik Chervonenkis (VC) dimension method which is a fundamental concept in statistical learning theory.
An $O(n \log n)$ time Algorithm for computing the Path-length Distance between Trees
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

Tree comparison metrics have proven to be an invaluable aide in the reconstruction and analysis of phylogenetic (evolutionary) trees. The path-length distance between trees is a particularly attractive measure as it reflects differences in tree shape as well as differences between branch lengths. The distance equals the sum, over all pairs of taxa, of the squared differences between the lengths of the unique path connecting them in each tree. We describe an $O(n \log n)$ time for computing this distance, making extensive use of tree decomposition techniques introduced by Brodal et al. (2004).
User-Directed Loop-Transformations in Clang
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2018
Year: 2018

Directives for the compiler such as pragmas can help programmers to separate an algorithm's semantics from its optimization. This keeps the code understandable and easier to optimize for different platforms. Simple transformations such as loop unrolling are already implemented in most mainstream compilers. We recently submitted a proposal to add generalized loop transformations to the OpenMP standard. We are also working on an implementation in LLVM/Clang/Polly to show its feasibility and usefulness. The current prototype allows applying patterns common to matrix-matrix multiplication optimizations.
Modeling IoT-aware Business Processes - A State of the Art Report
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

This research report presents an analysis of the state of the art of modeling Internet of Things (IoT)-aware business processes. IOT links the physical world to the digital world. Traditionally, we would find information about events and processes in the physical world in the digital world entered by humans and humans using this information to control the physical world. In the IoT paradigm, the physical world is equipped with sensors and actuators to create a direct link with the digital world. Business processes are used to coordinate a complex environment including multiple actors for a common goal, typically in the context of administrative work. In the past few years, we have seen research efforts on the possibilities to model IoT- aware business processes, extending process coordination to real world entities directly. This set of research efforts is relatively small when compared to the overall research effort into the IoT and much of the work is still in the early research stage. To create a basis for a bridge between IoT and BPM, the goal of this report is to collect and analyze the state of the art of existing frameworks for modeling IoT-aware business processes.
SUPC: SDN enabled Universal Policy Checking in Cloud Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Multi-tenant cloud networks have various security and monitoring service functions (SFs) that constitute a service function chain (SFC) between two endpoints. SF rule ordering overlaps and policy conflicts can cause increased latency, service disruption and security breaches in cloud networks. Software Defined Network (SDN) based Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has emerged as a solution that allows dynamic SFC composition and traffic steering in a cloud network. We propose an SDN enabled Universal Policy Checking (SUPC) framework, to provide 1) Flow Composition and Ordering by translating various SF rules into the OpenFlow format. This ensures elimination of redundant rules and policy compliance in SFC. 2) Flow conflict analysis to identify conflicts in header space and actions between various SF rules. Our results show a significant reduction in SF rules on composition. Additionally, our conflict checking mechanism was able to identify several rule conflicts that pose security, efficiency, and service availability issues in the cloud network.
Improving the Robustness of Speech Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Although neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved impressive progress recently, it is usually trained on the clean parallel data set and hence cannot work well when the input sentence is the production of the automatic speech recognition (ASR) system due to the enormous errors in the source. To solve this problem, we propose a simple but effective method to improve the robustness of NMT in the case of speech translation. We simulate the noise existing in the realistic output of the ASR system and inject them into the clean parallel data so that NMT can work under similar word distributions during training and testing. Besides, we also incorporate the Chinese Pinyin feature which is easy to get in speech translation to further improve the translation performance. Experiment results show that our method has a more stable performance and outperforms the baseline by an average of 3.12 BLEU on multiple noisy test sets, even while achieves a generalization improvement on the WMT'17 Chinese-English test set.
Cooperative Spectrum Sharing Between D2D Users and Edge-Users: A Matching Theory Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

The device-to-device (D2D) communication theoretically provides both the cellular traffic offloading and convenient content delivery directly among proximity users. However, in practice, no matter in underlay or overlay mode, the employment of D2D may impair the performance of the cellular links. Therefore, it is important to design a spectrum sharing scheme, under which the performance of both links can be improved simultaneously. In this paper, we consider the cell-edge user (CEU) scenario, where both sides have the demand to improve the quality of experience or service. Therefore, CEUs and D2D users both have intentions to form pairs, namely, CEU-D2D pairs, to cooperate mutually. Different from the conventional equilibrium point evaluation, the stable matching between D2D users and CEUs are formulated under matching theory framework instead. For each CEU-D2D pair, a two-stage pricing-based Stackelberg game is modeled to describe the willingness to cooperate, where the win-win goal is reached finally.
Effective Learning of Probabilistic Models for Clinical Predictions from Longitudinal Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

With the expeditious advancement of information technologies, health-related data presented unprecedented potentials for medical and health discoveries but at the same time significant challenges for machine learning techniques both in terms of size and complexity. Those challenges include: the structured data with various storage formats and value types caused by heterogeneous data sources; the uncertainty widely existing in every aspect of medical diagnosis and treatments; the high dimensionality of the feature space; the longitudinal medical records data with irregular intervals between adjacent observations; the richness of relations existing among objects with similar genetic factors, location or socio-demographic background. This thesis aims to develop advanced Statistical Relational Learning approaches in order to effectively exploit such health-related data and facilitate the discoveries in medical research. It presents the work on cost-sensitive statistical relational learning for mining structured imbalanced data, the first continuous-time probabilistic logic model for predicting sequential events from longitudinal structured data as well as hybrid probabilistic relational models for learning from heterogeneous structured data. It also demonstrates the outstanding performance of these proposed models as well as other state of the art machine learning models when applied to medical research problems and other real-world large-scale systems, reveals the great potential of statistical relational learning for exploring the structured health-related data to facilitate medical research.
Too Trivial To Test? An Inverse View on Defect Prediction to Identify Methods with Low Fault Risk
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Background. Test resources are usually limited and therefore it is often not possible to completely test an application before a release. To cope with the problem of scarce resources, development teams can apply defect prediction to identify fault-prone code regions. However, defect prediction tends to low precision in cross-project prediction scenarios. Aims. We take an inverse view on defect prediction and aim to identify methods that can be deferred when testing because they contain hardly any faults due to their code being "trivial". We expect that characteristics of such methods might be project-independent, so that our approach could improve cross-project predictions. Method. We compute code metrics and apply association rule mining to create rules for identifying methods with low fault risk. We conduct an empirical study to assess our approach with six Java open-source projects containing precise fault data at the method level. Results. Our results show that inverse defect prediction can identify approx. 32-44% of the methods of a project to have a low fault risk; on average, they are about six times less likely to contain a fault than other methods. In cross-project predictions with larger, more diversified training sets, identified methods are even eleven times less likely to contain a fault. Conclusions. Inverse defect prediction supports the efficient allocation of test resources by identifying methods that can be treated with less priority in testing activities and is well applicable in cross-project prediction scenarios.